April 17, 2014

The approach of Auckland Writers Festival 2014 has Booklovers in the City abuzz. Central City Library is running a Festival Preview series, featuring some of the city's more noted booklovers regaling audiences with their takes on the line-up. This guest post by Joanne Drayton, author of The search for Anne Perry and Ngaio Marsh: her life in crime, recapitulates the entertaining presentation with which she kicked off the series.

Dr. Joanne Drayton's "Full Story" on AWF 2014

Outside Bennetts Bookshop in Wellington, I read their thought for the week. The words of American historian Marilyn Young:

"If I ever get married, it will probably be to a book. I’m always falling in love with them and they’re wonderful in bed."

Joanne Drayton
(photo by Cass Power)

I was left pondering the awesome power of books. For they exist in two worlds: in the twilight of private life (in moments of quiet reading) and in the full blaze of public scrutiny (in press and magazine reviews). We read them as individuals, but also as part of the mob, with a “thumbs-up”, “thumbs-down” mentality. Reading books is essentially a private experience that plugs us into the public grid, connecting the individual to a greater matrix. So if we were to look for the source of their power, it is in their capacity to connect two worlds: the private and the public domain.

Books move us, they change us, they excite us in bed the way nothing else can (almost). In the ephemeral word of voice-mail and electronic messages, the published word speaks to us with a sense of permanence, in a coveted pact of isolation, at its best in a one-on-one relationship between writer and reader. Few other things rely on such intimacy: few other things touch us in such a personal way. But at the same time they have the power to shape our cultural memory; to assume the voice of ‘authority’ in the highly contested and contentious area of cultural activity, to tell our histories, to establish our iconic heroes – the famous and the infamous – to define our identities, and to tell us who we are.

The Auckland Writers Festival is a time when the private and public worlds of books collide. What a responsibility!

It is a banquet. A feast of Words, Ideas, People and Personalities – and someone’s just handed you a half sized dinner plate! You know, the ones always handed to ‘the women’ at family get-togethers and bar-b-ques.

So how do you make a choice when there's so much choice?

I decided to work out what thrills me the most. A quick look through the programme and I had my answers…

Because I’m fascinated by the whole crime phenomenon – why is it so popular, why has it infested popular television with almost the same degree of pestilence as cooking programmes? Why are people fascinated? Why does it grip all kinds of audiences from the Lords and landed gentry to the average and ordinary – like me?

Because I’m amazed by the virtuosity of the Norse … of the “Scandi-Noir pantheon”, as it says in the catalogue. Think of the greats that have come out of this part of the world – Stieg Larsson’s Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. And now, a Scandinavian Crime Queen -- Camilla Lackberg, sometimes called the Swedish Agatha Christie.

Lackberg became a writer after her family enrolled her in a creative writing course as a Christmas present: "For me, actually, specific images – snapshots – come first, and then the story starts to come together from those bits and pieces. I am very visual when I write, I 'see' the story in pictures and writing a book is like having a movie running in my head 24/7." Imagine how harrowing that must be!

But this is what I find fascinating … what interests her most of all (and me too), is the psychology of it all: ‘Just how horrible people can be!’ And where does this come from? And why? Each time a great crime doyenne sits down to write a new book, they visit this fundamental question, which I think remains the greatest mystery of all!

(This is fiction, but if you want to explore the politics of these issues in history, I think Reza Aslan’s session "The Politics of the Prophets" looks absolutely fascinating, too… 63: Sunday May 18 11:30am - 12:30pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre)

Twerking (I learned with the help of Wikipedia) is a type of dancing in which an individual, usually a female, dances to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance. Though the term seems to be of uncertain origin, common assumption suggest it is a contraction of “footwork” and a portmanteau of the words "twist" and "jerk". And just in case you didn’t know, the word was a runner-up in the Oxford Dictionaries "Word of the Year 2013".

While I can’t guarantee there will be a demonstration (perhaps with twerking on the table, this would have worked better as a workshop than a panel discussion), but this and more will be discussed by a stunning panel that includes:

Jessica Jackley, an American businesswoman and entrepreneur. Jessica was the co-founder and CEO of ProFounder, a platform that provided tools for small business entrepreneurs in the USA to access start-up capital through crowd funding and community involvement. She is married to Reza Aslan (whose session I have already mentioned).

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

Dame Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Professor of Research at the School of Māori and Pacific Development, at the University of Waikato – and such a good choice.

Sandi Toksvig, who is a Danish/British writer and comedian who is a regular participant in QI and Whose Line Is It Anyway? And is chair of The News Quiz on the BBC’s Radio 4. Just 3 words: Funny, fascinating and smart!!

And these are the qualities, the abilities, the special talents that Michael Leunig brings together in a workshop that is essentially about two things: Creativity and You. This is a workshop where you can discuss and explore the creative process with a practitioner who has shared and told stories in ways that we can learn from and learn about.

Whatever you put on your plate … make sure it sustains you imaginatively, creatively, and intellectually … because the choice is yours!

Joanne Drayton
Next AWF preview is 22 April, 5:30-6:30 pm, with Carole Beu, book reviewer and owner of the Women's Bookshop, and Iain Sharp, writer, former Books editor at Metro Magazine and the Sunday Star Times, and Manuscripts Librarian at Auckland Libraries Sir George Grey Special Collections. Central City Library, 44-46 Lorne St. Free entrance.